


glass her bones, steel her heart

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Kissing in the Snow, M/M, Magical Realism, New York City, Reunions, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 04:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14073033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Alec returns from Idris to a less than ordinary welcoming committee. Alec, Magnus, and the city that keeps them both.





	glass her bones, steel her heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is set somewhere in the season 3 timeline but there's no spoilers so, eh.

Brooklyn in winter twilight, a soft mirage under snow falling.

The tall stately trees rustle with their last leaves in Cadman Plaza Park, the lawn buried in white where his footprints appear out of the air. The snowfall eddies into his tracks, rounds them and smooths them over. Thinking of home landed him here.

Alec's not dressed for the weather. It was milder in Idris beyond the portal, which closes behind him as he reaches the sidewalk. The season turned while he was away. He tucks his collar up, sees a clock in a dim store window show the time. Eight past eleven.

The wind's from the estuary, piled with sticky, glittering flakes. A dog races across the end of a park promenade, red and gangly, chasing a whistle from the corner ahead. He doesn't think of running.

In the morning there'll be the Institute and the three-week backlog of everything. Here's the night, lit by the glow of the city cast back by the low-bellied clouds. The park, now behind. The cafés and storefronts, the street signs growing wild and crooked even in this placid neighborhood. Stranger things used to live by the river mouth, older than the city, than any people here. Magnus talks about it sometimes, despite his thoroughly urban nature. There's a reason why the warlocks have always taken to Brooklyn.

The longing rise sweet and keen, though they spoke less than ten hours ago. It hurries Alec along even as the city asks him to linger.

Can you love a place like you do a person?

His parents brought him to New York, so he learned New York. Streets, bridges, tunnels, high and hidden places. Habit and use don't mean affection. Care comes closer: care for the people, aware and unseeing, mortal and immortal. Care for the city, a secret that let him know itself.

The snow parts for passersby like a lace curtain, builds up on the hunched tops of parked cars. Lights dot the windows, people at work, at love, at the end or start of their day.

Alec hears his name, nearly misses the curb for it.

He's dreamed of Magnus for three weeks, filling unfamiliar beds and empty moments with memory. Too tired in the evenings for more than mistyped messages. When he woke, Magnus would be asleep. Alec may still be paranoid about his rest, and it doesn't matter how dead Valentine is, how buried his ghosts.

All in all: the sight of him sends a shiver through Alec. He stands across the crosswalk in a coat much better fit for the chill, the burgundy scarf around his neck. Snowflakes pepper his hair and shoulders.

Alec moves before he knows it. Doesn't think how it looks, if the walk sign is lit, if the people behind the windows care that Magnus meets him in the middle of the street. His face is wind-bitten, his laughter steaming against Alec's cheeks. Alec sweeps him into a hug that spins them both in a circle, leaves a pattern of teetering dance steps onto the snowy street. Magnus pulls his head down to kiss him. They stumble through it, cold lips warm with each other.

"Hey," Alec breathes. "I was gonna call you."

"At the front door?" 

"I had three blocks left to walk?"

Magnus shakes his head, but laughs again. He's real. He's real. Alec kisses him again, dimly aware they might be a traffic hazard, but also, it's past 11 PM on a residential street. There are more important things. Such as: Magnus's gloved hand in his hair, the other gripping his shoulder through the unlined jacket. The turn of his world around the pivot that's Magnus.

"Why are you out here, anyway? 'This kind of weather is why I invented the portal, Alexander'." Alec's own mirth wrecks his mimicry. "Yeah, that wasn't even close. But you'd say that."

"I walked Catarina and Madzie home. Sometimes one needs to feel the wind off the water."

It's not what Magnus says but the way he says it that tugs at Alec. Something about this night in particular, an unremarkable Wednesday in November. The glacial pulse of a vast dreaming thing laid under his own heartbeat.

"Me too," he says. "I don't know. Something in the air."

"Well," Magnus says, "she is our city. It pays to listen to her on occasion."

"Why does everybody think New York's a woman?" Magnus is warm, and Alec in no hurry to move away. "I thought you'd at least be more equal opportunity about it."

"I applaud the sentiment, but I'm afraid I agree with the marvelous Ms. Vega on that one." Alec knows he should get that reference. "However happy I am to see you. Did you miss me?"

"All the time. This whole traveling for work thing officially sucks."

Magnus's hands stop at his collar, his gaze flickering away and back again. This, still an unpeeling of armor layers. That Magnus even asked is a balm, a hope.

Magnus leans up, shifts his balance so he can brace against Alec. This third kiss is different from the first two, an unhurried searching like Magnus needs to commit him to memory all over again. The world narrows gently. Alec gives the kiss up, sinks in it, holds Magnus closer until they've had their breathless fill.

One kiss can't undo twenty days apart. It'll tide him over until they're somewhere warmer.

"I can't help but notice you're a little chilly there." A spurt of cheer seems to buoy Magnus over the slow beat of the kiss. "May I?"

Alec raises a brow, but nods. And then his palms prickle and his heart leaps as magic fizzes into him like he'd swallowed a mouthful of July sun. His blood thrums under Magnus's steady hands. The night whispers, hums, coiling closer. Something in the air, he said.

The snow swirls and stills around them. Alec feels like he's run a mile, flush with heat. "Okay. That's handy. Why do you even wear winter coats?"

"Style before substance, nothing before style, darling." A word Magnus only ever uses at least fifty per cent in jest, but that's what makes Alec fine with it. "Doing that all day would become exhausting. Even on a night when this grand old lady feels generous toward her people."

Magnus has been in New York for decades. Probably walked every street and turning alley, memorized the shape and sense of the city—a warlock can't watch over a place he doesn't know. Seen skyscrapers rise in Manhattan, the city shed her husk and remake herself over and over. Oh, now Alec's doing it too.

"I want to ask," Alec says. "But I also kinda want to get indoors and—not to get my hopes up—have a few hours with you before tomorrow morning hits me."

Magnus walks his fingers down Alec's chest in a tipping, pointed line. "That I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow doesn't mean I don't plan to get you naked, Mr. Lightwood. We can lay out the details after that."

Alec kisses him then, deep and helpless, an echo of the pull he felt toward Magnus before he could even quantify it, let alone act on it. Half staggering toward the curb, he knocks against a street lamp. Magnus follows with greater grace, never losing the kiss.

Maybe his question was the wrong way around. Can you love a person with the sprawling, manifold love a place demands? The kind that makes you want to find every nook and corner, study every mood and mystery. The kind that grows for years, between tile, between stone, and outlasts the brief lives of people.

The light blends their shadows into one, blue on the shining snow. They unentangle themselves, hands still linked.

Around them the city settles into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Suzanne Vega makes [a good case](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2caj4yU3zM).
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com)!


End file.
